Soft City*:

* inspired by Jonathan Raban’s book Soft City

“…the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map fixed by triangulation.

Unlike in villages and small towns, the cities can be kneaded by the nature of urban incomes. We can knead them with our ideas. we show them, we impose them our own personal form of resistance and they shape us this time. In this sense, it seems to me, to live in the city is an art. In order to describe the special relationship between the substance and the human, we need the dictionary of art at the creative everyday game of urban life.

The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

Jonathan Raban, Soft City: What Cities Do To Us, and How They Change the Way We Live, Think and Feel. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974